Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Earth's 6th Great Mass Extinction is Occurring Now

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."

"There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past, the most devasting being the Third major Extinction (c. 245 mya), the Permian, where 54% of the planet's species families lost. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year -- which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis -- this 'Sixth Extinction' -- is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed."

This sixth extinction is caused by man, though the article draw comparison to the Cretaceous cometary collision 65 million years ago. That threw up particles into the air affecting the atmosphere, which is what we're doing to the earth now. They also claim our affect began around 10,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture.

"The causes of biocide are a hodge-podge of human environmental “poisons” which often work synergistically, including a vast array of pollutants, pesticides, a thinning ozone layer which increases ultra-violet radiation, human induced climate change, habitat loss from agriculture and urban sprawl, invasions of exotic species introduced by humans, illegal and legal wildlife trade, light pollution, and man-made borders among other many other causes."

"Critics argue that species disappear and new ones emerge all the time. That’s true, if you’re speaking in terms of millennia. Scientists acknowledge that species disappear at an estimated rate of one species per million per year, with new species replacing the lost ones at around the same rate. Recently humans have accelerated the extinction rate to where several entire species are annihilated every single day. The death toll artificially caused by humans is mind-boggling. Nature will take millions of years to repair what we destroy in just a few decades."

1 comment:

Will
said...

Hello Howard,Thanks for bringing this subject matter to the attention of your readers! Because of this blog entry, I thought you might be interested in visit www.oneplanetonelife.com. We are a nonprofit organization bringing awareness of this crisis to the general public before it is late. If you like what you see, please consider supporting our efforts in any way you can!Thanks again!Will